


In Control

by LolMouse



Series: Side Stories [5]
Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series)
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Horror, Mystery, Suspense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 13:23:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20892809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LolMouse/pseuds/LolMouse
Summary: It's Halloween, and Control Freak is ready for the annual scary movie marathon. That is, until it's cancelled by a city-wide emergency.





	In Control

It was Halloween, and Control Freak was ready for the annual horror movie marathon! Featuring the classics, the scariest, the nastiest, the grodiest horror flicks of all time in all their glory, with drinks and snacks at the ready to last the full 24 hour scare-fest!

The now cancelled horror movie marathon. Due to a "state of emergency." How dare they. How  ** _dare_ ** they.

Well. He'd show them. Show them all. Show them the true meaning of emergency! He grabbed his remote and walked towards the city center. If the horror movies weren't coming over to him, he'd bring them to the city!

Even if the fog-shrouded streets were empty. He supposed the emergency was making people stay indoors, after all. No matter. Once he was at the video store and had awakened all the fun standees and horror shelf specials they had to do his bidding, just like the Video Home System before him, he'd bring the terror right to their doorstep!

Was it just him or were the shadows in the alleys a little darker than usual? Eh. Whatever. He'd just had one too many energy drinks to prepare. He raised his remote, twiddling some settings on it, and-

-What was that? He turned around. Something had moved. Or rather, it was as if the shadow on the wall had moved.

He frowned, grumbled to himself, and took a few more steps. They echoed weirdly on the empty street. Even though, now that he was thinking of it, they hadn't echoed before.

Was the fog getting thicker? He quickened his pace, trying to be unaffected, but his brain conjured visions of horror movies he'd seen-

-Something moved! Really moved! He turned around, breathing faster, pointing the remote at the fog... and then it hit him. Why was he seeing shadows? There was no light they could be cast by. The mist would be blocking it.

Shapes. Shapes in the mist. Solid, dark shapes. Silent.

He turned around, walking faster, then running. What was going on? Shouldn't he be at the store by now? He'd stopped even seeing the walls of the street... the street... He looked down at his feet. What was he walking on? Cracked, dry earth, bits of dead vegetation... when had he left the concrete? Where? How? 

He stumbled and fell, nearly dropping his remote. He turned over and looked at what he'd stubbed his toe on. It looked like the top of some ancient ruined column. Not greek or roman, but... similar. Dark, cracked marble. Big, too, so big that he should have run into it rather than fallen over it.

He scrambled away, trying to get up, and looked at... his own shadow. Pitch black, despite the lack of light, stretching out beneath him. He looked up at the silhouette of his head, and gulped.

Red eyes. Two at first. Then four. Then the pairs began to multiply, and multiply, and even as he tried to scramble away in panic he felt himself begin falling  **inside** his own shadow, down, down into the strange darkness-

  
  
  
  


He woke up in a white room. He didn't recognize it. He looked down at his chest. He was wearing all white. He grasped around for the familiar remote, but it was gone. He sat up. Across from him, a large mirror dominated the wall. He looked at his own reflection.

He wasn't panicked. He didn't really know why. It was like a dream.

"Hello, Freak," he said, waving to himself. Except he hadn't said anything. Both his hands were still on the floor. He blinked.

It wasn't a mirror. It was... him. Another version of him. The other him got up, and he backed away.

"What's the matter, Freak?" asked his double. "It's just you and me. Meaning just you. Or me." The mirror-him smiled menacingly.

"What... what's going on?"

"What else could it be? It's a brain scramble episode! Like on Star Trek!" The mirror-him chuckled. "Is it real, is it a dream, were you kidnapped? Who knows! It's all in your mind. Maybe."

Control Freak narrowed his eyes. He wasn't this annoying in real life. Surely not. "Very funny. If this is my mind, then I'm in charge. I control-"

"-the vertical, you control the horizontal!" As the mirror-him spoke, the walls morphed and changed from the pure white of before to black, showing distorted lines that moved as the doppelganger directed. "Hey, looks like I'm in charge. So maybe this is my mind after all and you're the double. Hah! I knew it! Nice try, whoever it is who's doing this! Control Freak is always in Control!"

He blinked at his mirror-double and got up, still able to clearly see despite the dark walls. "Excuse me? I'm the real one here!"

His double did a little wiggle with his hands. "Myeh, I'm the weal wone hewe! Hah! Simple trick. You can't make me doubt me inside my own mind! I own my own mind!" As if to demonstrate, the double clapped his hand and clicked his heels - now decorated with ruby slippers. "All I gotta do is say there's no place like home, and we can be done with this farce!"

"No!" He clapped his own hands and clicked his own heels. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. "No! I'm the real one! I'm in charge! This is my mind!"

"There's no place like home," his double said, and clicked, and all was dark. And Control Freak was alone, now standing in what looked like an eternal, pitch-black void, with just the one mirror-wall now displaying static like an old TV set.

"Wait. No. No! Come back! We're not done here! I'm the real one! I control everything! I own my mind!"

No answer.

"No, no, no," he mumbled to himself. "This is just another layer to the mind scramble. They know how to get to me. I'm still here, aren't I? That means I'm real." He reached out his hand to look at it, and-

Nothing. He looked down. Or thought he did. There was nothing.

No! he shouted. Or thought he had. There was no sound. He was disappearing. He was... nothing. He wasn't real. Even his thoughts felt strange, as if he were just the last, fading echo of someone else's

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


What was this emptiness?

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He was in charge. He was Control Freak. They'd called him Freak, and then he'd put them in their place, taken Control.

Hadn't he?

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Fear. He clung to his fear. That was what he was feeling. Pure dread. If his fear was real, surely he was real? Right?

  
  


Right?

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He'd taken control. Taken. By force. From the people who didn't understand. Or appreciate. But before that-

Before that...

He had always been in control inside his own mind. Alone in the den, late at night, darkened room, with nothing but that tiny TV and tapes. The magic of cinema, but at home.

His mind clung to this thought. This lifeline. Even if it brought up the shape of memories he didn't want. He cast about wildly in his fragmenting memory for something else, something…

The standard VHS NTSC format resolution was 525 lines of information. In the computer age, this translated to 720 × 486—that is, 720 horizontal pixels by 486 vertical pixels. And not clear, sharp images at that resolution either. Muddy, dark, flickering, damaged tapes displaying tearing from dozens of hours of reuse and rewind.

It had looked like crap. It had been his childhood-

No. Adjust the antenna. Find a different signal. A different signal...

  
  
  


As a kid, film director David Cronenberg would rotate the antenna on his TV set at night, trying to find signals he wasn't supposed to. This inspired his work on the movie Videodrome. Not the greatest of all time, not the scariest, but it had always been Control Freak's personal favorite. 

After all, what if the signal you found changed you life? Showed you something spectacular? Or terrifying? Something you weren't supposed to see?

Well, Control Freak had seen it after he'd tried it for himself. The Signal. He had been in his room, adjusting the aerial one summer night with his TV remote in hand, and had seen... it. It. The thing that let him take Control. The Signal. That indefinable quality that let him transmit himself, through his little gadget, into things around him, the things he could conjure in his mind by drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of films past and present.

His dad had been the first to learn what that meant. No. No. Remember something else-

  
  


He was like an antenna, still. Receiving the Signal. Or was it inside him, being broadcast? He had never been quite sure.

Was he still receiving it? Or was he just an echo of his mind, transmitted into some object only to be forgotten? Was this what it was like to be one of the things he put under his control? To receive the Signal and then fade away, slowly, once it wasn't useful?

Was this what was happening to him?

Was he just a signal without a receiver, a TV without an audience?

And like any signal, once it lost energy... what would become of him?

The terror gripped him again and he rode the wave as it crested, casting himself out without his remote, desperately seeking someone, anyone, any ** _thing_ ** that could receive-

  
  
  


He flickered on in the dark, his cathode ray rube displaying static to a nearby raven. It startled and flew off, cawing angrily, its wings and anger the only sounds aside from the hiss he was emitting.

He had no eyes, but he saw. He was alone in a desolate wasteland stretching for miles in all directions under what looked like an odd kind of ambient light, light with no sun or moon or stars, nothing but desolation and dead trees and more ravens around. The hiss and snowy flickering lit up a patch of ground. No audience to sit around to watch him.

He concentrated, and a dial to one side of his screen turned, adjusting, searching. The antenna connected to the socket on his back strained to find any sense, any meaning, in the ambient electronic noise.

Something! Like a voice! He strained and adjusted the dial more carefully. Half a word. A tiny bit of color. And then-

"Who are you? What are you doing in here?" A woman's voice, inquisitive, demanding.

He couldn't see the image he was displaying, of course. He wasn't the audience. But he could see a slight reflection of it in the dust. Dark, mostly, but inside the darkness was a yellow outline with what looked like two gleaming circles.

I'm just an echo, he thought, thinking at the broadcast as if it could hear him.

"An echo of what?"

He was startled. Shockingly, he nearly fell over, despite the fact that he couldn't move. What? Could the TV signal really hear him?

"TV signal? What are you talking about? Of course I can hear you."

Oh. Well, I'm just an echo. A signal without a proper receiver.

The broadcast image sighed, exasperated. "Okay, this isn't going anywhere. Give me a moment."

He felt the oddest sensation, and then... a hand extended from the screen. Another. They grasped the earth in front of him, and a shock of dark hair followed as a person - a young woman, clad in yellow - crawled out of the signal and into the world.

He'd seen this movie, but he'd never imagined he'd be on this side of the screen.

"Yuck," she said, dusting off her hands as she rose. "Couldn't be pleasant, now could it. Now then." 

The woman turned around, and he recognized her - or thought he did. It was one of the Teen Titans. Raven, except her cloak was yellow, and she had a large pair of glasses on.

Raven? He thought at her.

"Close enough," she said, bending down to look directly into the screen. "You really are a television, aren't you. Curious. What part of her are you, if you are one at all?"

Part of who? He asked.

The young woman frowned. "I suppose that answers the latter question. Fine. How did you come to be in here, little television?"

I'm an echo, he thought, sadly. Just someone's forgotten broadcast, inhabiting an object, destined to fade away.

"Ominous and dramatic," Yellow Raven opined dryly, "but hardly illuminating. Who projected you, echo?"

Him, he thought. Control Freak.

"What?" Yellow Raven cocked her head curiously. "What does he have to do with... Well, never mind. I suppose you are as safe here as anywhere.”

But I'm so afraid, he thought.

The yellow Raven shuddered, and the world, in some indefinable way, seemed to shudder with her. "Don't say that word, please."

What? What word? Please, I might fade away, I'm terrified-

The world shuddered again and Raven clasped her head between her hands. "Not that word either!"

He composed his thoughts. What words? You mean fear? Terror?

The wasteland... cracked. Not like the earth had split, but like a mirror had shattered, leaving innumerable pieces floating in a void. The yellow raven cowered down. "Please don't," she asked.

Why those words? He asked.

"They're bad," said a much quieter voice. Out of the edge of his vision - because of course he couldn't turn to see - floated another Raven, this one cloaked in grey. "We don't like them. We're trying to hide from them." She reached down and hugged the yellow one.

He considered this for a moment. How are there two of you? He asked.

"Immaterial," said the yellow one, composing herself. "What concerns me now is, how did you come to be here? And don't talk about being an echo, or whatever. You could only have come here to the grey wastes if you were running away from something."

What would I be running away from? He asked. I don't even exist. I'm just a stray fragment of Control Freak's signal, projected into this TV, waiting to fade out of existence. He got out of here a long time ago, wherever here is.

The two Ravens stared at him, then looked at each other. Then the yellow one stood up and bent over, placing her hand on his dials. "I think I understand what's happened here," she said. "Bad memories, I take it. Childhood? Adolescence?"

I don't want to remember those things, he said.

She nodded. "Alright. You don't have to. That is what this place is for, after all. Escape from yourself. It is why I am here. Our situation is not so different."

What do you have to run away from? You're the scariest of the Teen Titans! Probably the most powerful!

She shuddered again. "Have you ever heard of Doctor Jonathan Crane?"

He nodded, without a body. Somehow, she understood.

"The Scarecrow decided to visit Jump City on Halloween for whatever reason, and handed out some... tricks and treats. One of them struck Raven. The other Titans retreated and called to place the entire city on high alert. When Raven’s not in control of her powers, they can go… wild.”

Something about this stirred a memory in him. That's right. They cancelled the horror movie marathon. So Control Freak went outside and- I went outside and-

He looked down at himself. His hands. His feet. On his belt sat the remote, secure in its holster. The yellow Raven's hand was on his shoulder. "I... That's right. I never used the remote tonight. I never took Control of anything. Not yet. Something in the fog chased me, and-"

"You fell into a shadow," yellow Raven said. The grey one seemed to cower deeper into her cloak, as if that were possible. "And you faced your... fears," she whispered, sending a ripple across the islands in the void. "And you ran away."

"To my realm," whispered the grey one. "Just like Raven's reason."

He blinked. "Wait, so... you're parts of Raven?"

"Of her mind," nodded Yellow. "I am what she uses to face her... apprehensions. The rational, reasonable part of her mind which calms her... emotions, and allows her to face adversity with a clear mind. Her reason, if you will. But as anyone knows, sometimes a rational mind retreats when faced with overwhelming..." She didn't finish the sentence.

"Oh, right, like in a scary movie when someone does something stupid because they're so scared and people think it's unrealistic but actually it makes a lot of sense when you think about it because they're not acting rationally in their emotional state," said Control Freak.

The two Ravens stared.

"I argue a lot on the internet with people who think those scenes don't make sense," he said, puffing out his chest.

"...I bet you do," said yellow Raven wryly. "And until Crane's toxin wears off, I'm afraid I can't help you any further. Raven is unable to face her... predicament."

Control Freak grinned. "You know, fear isn't so bad." He ignored the odd shuddering reality-ripple that he now realized emanated from the yellow Raven. "People watch scary movies on purpose."

"And I will never fathom why," yellow Raven said.

"It's not so weird! Think about it. You sit down in your own time, in your own surroundings, and watch something scary, but you always maintain that little psychological distance, you know? And no matter how gory or weird it is, so long as it's a little bit unreal you can enjoy it. And in the end, you're always in control. You're in control of it from the moment you sit down right to the end. I know all about taking control."

The two Ravens looked at each other. The yellow one nodded. "I... know something about that as well, yes."

"Well," he said, "I have watched a lot of horror movies. Like, a lot, a lot. And this situation? It doesn't seem too real to me. So if you're not going to take charge, or you can’t, then I am."

Yellow Raven cocked her head to the side again. "And how exactly do you intend to do that?"

"Like this," he said, taking out his remote and pointing it at the island they stood on. He pressed a button before either of them could protest.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Control Freak emerged, gasping, into the street in front of his favorite video store, right into the back of some gangly dude.

"What?" asked the stranger, turning around. He was wearing some kind of pumpkin-faced sack on his head. "Who are you-"

Control Freak punched him as hard as he could, and the gangly figure fell to the ground like a ragdoll.

"I'm in Control," he said cheerfully. He flexed whatever muscle he had. "Oh yeah, all hail the new flesh! I'm back, baby!" looking around. He saw some familiar faces; Cyborg and Robin, both wearing some kind of filter mask around their heads, their eyes practically bulging out of their heads.

"Surprised?" he said, cackling, before looking behind him. On the ground, taking shape from shadows coalescing from the surroundings, was a coughing Raven. He realized he'd probably emerged from her cloak. "Shouldn't you be taking better care of your teammate?"

Robin moved to assist her, putting his arm around her. "Are you alright?" He asked.

"I'll be fine," she said. "After we purge the fear toxin from my system. I'm in control again, at least for now."

"That makes two of us," said Control Freak. Raven, now in her familiar indigo cloak, simply looked him in the eye and nodded softly before doubling over into another cough. 

He smiled evilly. "Now, I have one demand to make of you, Teen Titans!"

Cyborg raised his arm, revealing his cannon. "Oh yeah? What's that?"

"Cancel the state of emergency so I can go back to watching my Halloween movie marathon!"

Cyborg's mask almost fell off as his jaw dropped.

"Done," said Robin.

"Great! Uh, give me ten minutes to get home!" He ran off in the direction of his apartment, ignoring the Titans. If he was lucky, they'd paused the broadcast while the emergency was on. He'd just been getting to the really good part of Wicked Scary V.

He grinned as an evil thought entered his mind. Maybe he could just leave the Titans with a parting gift. He raised his remote and… Stopped.

He hadn't really been an echo. That hadn't been real. He didn't really leave echoes like that with his Signal.

Right?

He frowned and put the remote back into its holster. He couldn't wait to be back in front of the TV, watching movies he knew so he wouldn’t have to think about these things. Back in Control.


End file.
